The present invention relates to deep question answering systems, and more specifically, to deep question answering systems which do not process supporting evidence when the supporting evidence scoring does not affect the final ranking of a candidate answer.
Deep QA systems typically generate a large set of candidate answers and then search and process a large set of content to serve as supporting evidence for each candidate answer. Currently, deep question answering systems (deep QA systems) incur a large percentage of processing overhead while searching and processing articles used as supporting evidence for candidate answers. The supporting evidence may include, for example, any information in a corpus of information, such as articles, studies, research papers, and the like. The overall performance of the deep QA system can be improved by optimizing the supporting evidence processing phase.